If you have children between eight and 18, the chances are you’ve heard of the multiplayer online shooter Fortnite: Battle Royale. Here’s what you need to know

You know a video game has made it when ITV daytime programme This Morning posts on its Facebook page asking parents if their kids are addicted. You can be doubly sure when that post attracts almost 60,000 comments. In this case the game is Fortnite: Battle Royale, a bright, brash multiplayer shooter. It was released last year, and is now one of the biggest online games out there.

With more than 40m players worldwide, the chances are either your children or their friends are already passionate fans. For some, that fandom may well be bordering on obsession. Should you be worried? Here’s what you need to know about the game.

Gamers of all stripes have taken to DBFZ – not only for the exquisite anime style and fluid mechanics, but because it brings back the fun and community of early-90s fighting titles

As a teenager in the early 90s, there was only one real threat to my academic future. It wasn’t drugs or alcohol and it certainly wasn’t a doomed love affair (if only!). It was Street Fighter II.

Capcom’s superlative fighting game arrived in 1991, revolutionising the genre with its flamboyant characters and elaborate special moves. I’d played martial arts sims for years, blowing all my pocket money on formative titles such as Yie Ar Kung-Fu, Way of the Exploding Fist and International Karate, but this was something different: a brilliant, frenzied combination of magical warriors and super-precise control systems that used joystick rotations and button combinations to produce eye-popping attacks and counters.

Now available free on PC, Dead Space came closer than any other game to replicating the look, feel and atmosphere of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi thriller

This week, Electronic Arts has made one of the most interesting and atmospheric narrative games of the 2000s available for free to users of its Origin gaming service. Released in 2008 and created by Californian studio Visceral Games, Dead Space remains a heady, often terrifying thrill ride and if you’ve never played it before, it’s worth taking this chance – especially if you’re a fan of the Alien movies.

Although there have been numerous attempts to bring Alien directly to video games – most successfully, Creative Assembly’s incredibly tense Alien: Isolation – it’s Dead Space that has got closest to replicating the look, feel and atmosphere of Ridley Scott’s original film.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance describes itself as a realistic and historically accurate role-playing game, which are dangerous words for any game to throw around. History, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder, while “realistic” should indicate more than just “visually detailed”. Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s version of historical realism is obsessive in certain areas, but curiously neglectful in others.

The epic, if familiar, narrative centres around Henry, a blacksmith’s son living in 15th-century Bohemia. Young Hal’s life is flung into chaos after a power spat between the king and his brother results in his village being torched and his parents being murdered. Fleeing with nothing but the last sword his father made, he embarks upon a quest for vengeance that sees him claw his way up the rigid social hierarchy of medieval Europe.

The Xbox and PC online multiplayer pirate adventure will boast sea monsters and skeleton forts – and this is only the beginning

When the veteran British games studio Rare first revealed Sea of Thieves in 2015, it’s fair to say the response was positive. After years spent concentrating on the controversial Kinect device, the creator of luscious SNES and N64 classics Donkey Kong Country and Banjo-Kazooie unveiled an online pirate adventure where groups of friends would set sail on an open ocean, seeking out treasure and doing battle with other player crews. It felt like the beloved developer had truly returned.

Two years later, anticipation remains high. Within five hours of the recent closed beta test going live, it was the most watched game on streaming service Twitch, beating even the mighty League of Legends. In the end, more than 300,000 people signed up to play, spending 2m hours and completing 400,000 quests in the week-long test.

In this hugely popular Battle Royale-style game, all nuance is gone – it’s nothing but rage and death

The island of Erangel is kind of beautiful. It has rolling hills and lush valleys, and there are little villages dotted along the coastlines. Just one thing, though. Everyone here wants to kill you.

This is PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), the hit online multiplayer game that sold more than 24m copies last year. Originally developed as a modification of the military shooting sim, Arma 2, it’s now a standalone release on PC and Xbox One and fans are obsessed with it. Inspired by the Hunger Games books and movies, as well as Kinji Fukasaku’s cult film Battle Royale, it sees 100 players being dropped on to the island, before searching for useful items such as backpacks, body armour and guns and then trying to kill each other. The last player standing wins.

Playing with my brother is one of many ways he reveals himself not as a ‘disabled’ person – but simply as his own person

In 2005, when my brother Euan was still a schoolboy, we used to play a lot of Tekken 5 together. If you’re new to this famed video game series, it’s a one-on-one martial arts simulation – a ferocious yet endearingly flamboyant experience in which kangaroos trade blows with Bruce Lee clones, and winged demons grapple with Mexican wrestlers. And I’m fairly sure Euan is the most savage, unprincipled Tekken 5 player ever to lay his traitorous fingers upon a PlayStation 2 controller. Some combatants prefer to open a bout with a stunning punch to the lower body, but Euan was rarely that noble. “Wait a minute, I want to show you something,” he’d declare, scuttling out of reach. I’d dutifully wander over to his side of the arena, all patronising solicitude, and he’d kick me in the face.

Euan is a dirty fighter. But he’s also one of the most fearlessly imaginative people you’ll meet. And in its own small way, our shared gaming hobby is proof of this.

Eidos Montreal’s reboot of the respected stealth-‘n-steal series is out in a month. Here’s what is right – and wrong – with the return of Garrett, the master thief

As obvious as it sounds to say so, in Thief you nick things. You nick a lot of things. Broaches, necklaces, wallets, candelabras – anything valuable that’s lying around, really – all disappear into lead character Garrett’s bottomless sack. You find some of these trinkets in the oddest of places. One would expect to find a golden bracelet or two in a wall safe behind a painting, but who on earth leaves a goblet on a rooftop or a couple of coins at the edge of a pond?

It’s possible Eidos Montreal has left these treasures scattered around its game in order to put players into the headspace of its protagonist. If that’s the case, it’s an absolutely brilliant piece of game design because stealing stuff in Thief isn’t just fun, it’s addictive. After you’ve snagged your first five or six baubles, you turn into a veritable magpie, filled with the need to obtain any shiny object that catches your eye – even if it means potentially exposing Garrett to danger in order to do so.

From lost adventures to forgotten puzzlers, here are the classic titles that games history has cruelly overlooked

History is not always kind to great games. Titles once heralded as masterworks are often lost as console cycles turn. Alternatively, there are the offbeat outliers completely shunned during their own lifetimes, only to be quietly ransacked by later generations of designers.

Here, we be remember 30 brilliant, idiosyncratic, challenging or just plain weird titles that have been erased from the gaming annals, or at least criminally overlooked. Each one of these did something interesting with gaming, just not interesting enough to be endlessly recalled in misty-eyed retro articles or on otherwise pretty good Charlie Brooker documentaries.